An Unkept Faith
by America.Mer
Summary: In late summer of 1919, Faith Meredith returns to her life in the Glen St. Mary. The war is over, and Blythes and the Merediths have a whole new world to build. The future is theirs, if only their pasts could stop getting in the way.
1. Hector or Andromache

Faith climbed the last few steps to the manse's garret to find Jerry where she'd suspected. Leaning out the back window, a faint intermittent stream of smoke was emanating from his silhouette. Backlit like this against the Glen St. Mary dusk, she couldn't see the ways the war had aged her brother and he seemed almost as if he could have been the Jerry from back in their Redmond days.

"Mind if I join you?"

He must've heard her come up, as he didn't startle or for that matter even turn around, but rather shrugged and nodded as he continued to smoke and stare out the window. They were faced towards the hill of the old West house, across the section of rainbow valley that ran along near the manse. Faith stood next to him at the window a minute and tried in vain to find the ghost of the little girl that had first played there so many years ago. That she, and Jerry, and Una and Carl, and all the Blythe children from the rainbow valley days were the same young adults that had regathered in the Glen throughout this summer was difficult to parse. Almost as difficult as to remember that they were still indeed young adults, and that at twenty-four she might go on to live her lifetime to date twice, or maybe three times over.

"May I?" she asked, gesturing to the box of tobacco and papers on the lonely chair next to her brother.

At that, he finally turned, and gave her a sharp look, as if considering.

"I haven't unpacked my things yet, and the rest of mine are at the bottom of some pack or another I suspect" she explained, as she watched Jerry waver.

She suspected then that it was Second Lieutenant Gerald Meredith who gave his assent, not her older brother Jerry of the Good Conduct Club days. In turn, it was a cigarette she rolled as Faith Meredith, formerly of the V.A.D., not Faith the eldest daughter of the Presbytery manse.

* * *

"Will you really all go to Redmond in the fall?" Bruce Meredith asked Una, as she tackled the dishes from their dinner. Rosemary and their father had gone to call on Ellen and Norman Douglas for the evening, in a poorly disguised attempt to give the Meredith children some time to themselves. Carl was rocking forlornly on the front veranda, and Una suspected she'd rather not know where Jerry and Faith had escaped to. At eleven years old, Bruce was the only one of the five who truly remained a child, and Una had been sad to see the surprise in all three of her other siblings faces at even his height.

"I suppose we might well, Bruce," Una replied, although she knew full well that at the very least Carl's pilgrimage to Kingsport was far from certain, and she hadn't the least idea what Faith intended to do. Jerry, Faith, and Carl had all come back from Europe changed, in ways that Una suspected she might never understand. Her war years had been filled with a quiet, understated sort of heartbreak, but she hadn't lived all the violence that the others had. Her war years had aged her, and had deepened in her a stoic and calm resolve in the face of both relentless great tragedy and petty injustice. Still, she smothered a smile at the indignation on the as-of-yet-chubby face looking up at her.

"But then what shall I do?" he cried.

"Well, you'll go to school, and help father and your mother, and grow up, and then help build the new world that's been started," she replied, patiently, and willed herself to believe it would be as easy as all that.

Faith had finally returned three nights ago, the last of the Meredith children to return, and the last of the Blythe-Meredith children who would return. She had telephoned up to the Manse from Charlottetown around midday, and Una had picked up the 'phone:

"Oh good, I had hoped it would be you, Una dear," Faith had said rather hurriedly, "listen, suppose you could tell Jem I'll be in on the eight-o-four train tonight, and ask if he might meet me? I wouldn't presume to tear anyone else away at dinner time, but it would be nice to have a familiar face at the station."

If Una thought this bold and somewhat transparent, she didn't betray as much, although she did permit herself to hope against hope that nobody else had had their receiver down along the party line. She could hardly begrudge Faith her wish, and she knew as well as anyone that the manse line was shared with far fewer busy bodies than the line at Ingleside.

Later, she walked through the valley towards Ingleside, suspecting quite rightly that she might just as well find Jem there as at the house. He was sitting with Rilla near where they had used to fry fish in their early teenage years. Rilla and Jem had become quite chummy in the months he'd been back, and together they had mourned Walter, and kept faith as they waited for the return of the loves that the war had yet to give back.

She sat down on the log across from them and relayed the message from Faith to Jem. The smile that broke out across his face came slowly, and certainly. Jem Blythe had always been charming, had had a jovial sort of confidence that had reassured everyone around him, but this smile wasn't the roguish one of his Queen's and B.A. days. It was smile that radiated some bone deep satisfaction, and a happiness that seemed to come to him as if clicking something back into place, fixing one of the things that Una had assumed the war had permanently broken.

Rilla's smile was something else as well; quiet, private, perhaps a little indulgent. There was a happiness that she and Una shared, in watching Jem's excitement unfold. It was true that there was a gulf that could not be travelled between any of them, for they had all lost differently in the last five years; but there was also a patience for each other that in Una's estimation surpassed in value even the camaraderie of their youth.

"You'd better get some rest first then," Rilla said matter-of-factly, and added, after a quick glance at Una, "Would you like company up to the house?"

"I had a question to ask Susan or your mother about gingerbread," Una supplied quickly in the space that followed, standing up, never mind that it was still August and gingerbread wouldn't be called for for a number of months.

Apart from Jem's slow sigh, he seemed to accept the careful dignity the girls had handed to him in their light phrases. Rilla tucked her arm into his as they ascended the valley to Ingleside, and if she had passed behind him to his injured side, and if he did lean on her a little intermittently, they all ignored it with a proud Presbyterian coolness.

* * *

There had been a cigarette rolled already in the tobacco case, but Faith had pulled out two papers despite this, and rolled a short smoke in each. One for now, and one out of habit. She tucked the superfluous cigarette into the case next to Jerry's extra, and lit hers. She hadn't smoked since she'd gotten off the ferry in Charlottetown, and as she inhaled, she felt something unknot inside her. She'd gotten used to thinking of little more than the task in front of her at the hospital, and when she wasn't working she'd been thinking how to turn dreary nursing tasks into funny little episodes to send back home, and funnier little episodes to send out to the boys.

She'd been grateful to be in England in the last few years of the war; grateful when Jem was training in England and she'd been able to see him, grateful when Jem was fighting in France and she didn't have to wait for transatlantic letters from him, and even grateful when he was missing for those long, long months. That was a grateful to be busy, a grateful she hadn't known she could be. That someone needed her, even if it was just the hospital matron, and even, especially, if she was needed not as Faith Meredith, B.A, of the Glen St. Mary, but simply needed as a set of reliable hands for jobs too beneath those of trained medical professionals.

As it stood, she wasn't sure anymore how to be Faith Meredith, B.A., of the Glen St. Mary.

Her first night, Jem had been at the station just as she'd asked. He was stronger than he had been when she'd last seen him, right before he got on a boat back to Canada, as she'd hoped. He wasn't back-to-normal in the way he'd assured her by letter, but she'd known that wasn't to be the case before she'd seen them. The letters that had held the two together in the last five years had been far less censored than her letters to everyone else, but it was still possible to write hopes as if they were truths.

They'd gone to the manse first, and then Ingleside, and both welcomes had held their discordant moments. She'd been surprised how much harder Carl's eyepatch was to take in once safe on PEI soil than it had been in the hospitals of England. In the convalescent ward where she'd visited him, she'd been glad for his other eye, and for his mobility and safety and life. There had been a huge number of men wounded worse than he was in his ward, and so many more still out there in harms way. But in the shadowy manse hallway, the violence of his injury was so much clearer to Faith. She realised as she looked between Carl, Jerry, and Jem that Shirley was the only one of their boys who hadn't been wounded.

Before spring 1917, she'd kept house with the twins through three lonely war winters in Kingsport, but she hadn't seen them since Di had been forbidden to accompany her to join the V.A.D. On the train to the Glen, she'd worried most about feeling awkward around them, the two who she'd held vigil with for so much of the war. Her last two years serving had dwarfed the years that had proceeded them entirely. In the years that followed, she'd recognise anew the pain inflicted by the quiet unending provincial tedium of the war on the women who stayed behind, but initially this acknowledgement was almost academic. The meeting had been pleasant nonetheless, and there had been genuine happiness in both reunions. Still, Faith, as she had worried, had felt quiet at-odds a fair few times throughout the evening, and the days that had followed.

In England, Faith had felt like Andromache. In Canada, she felt more like Hector, had he returned for that bath after all.


	2. A Shore Party

Faith had been back in the glen for nearly a week before all the Meredith and Blythe children managed to assemble en mass. When they finally did manage it, it wasn't in Rainbow Valley as Carl would have predicted, but rather was a shore party that Rilla and Jerry had concocted between them. They'd seen to it that both households could all be there, had badgered Susan making up a basket of treats, and then had to prevent Una from adding to it unduly. Rilla had declared the treats were too numerous to carry, and stomped hard on Carl's foot when he'd voiced the obvious objection, so a few of them had taken Dr. Blythe's auto down to the beach.

The walking party had been led by Jerry and Nan. They squabbled the whole way down to the shore, and were consequently given a wide berth, as they were known on occasion to attempt to secure an opinion from anyone who dared stray too close.

Following behind them in the little procession was Di and Faith. Diana had grasped Faith's arm firmly and pulled her into the walking group at the outset of their journey, as they had loaded up the Blythe's auto. Faith had made some attempt to join Jem and the others in the auto, but Di had read the shuttering expression on Jem at the same moment Faith had and spared them all the embarrassment of addressing it outright.

Finally, Una and Carl had pulled up the end of their gang. They walked in a silence that held no ill will but could still not rightly be described as comfortable. The youngest two Blythes had insisted on driving with Jem, as they were the only two of their lot who had learned how, and each held the other's skills in deep suspicion.

Carl and Una were just far enough behind the others that they wouldn't accidentally overhear whatever conversation was happening ahead of them. Since last Christmas, Carl had spent more time with the younger of his sisters than he ever had before. Jerry and Faith had loud enough personalities that even before the Blythes, they had never had to entertain themselves just them two. Exhaustion and relentless, tedious tragedy hadn't been enough to cure him of his chronic mischievousness in the trenches, but back home, with the time and space to breath freely the war seemed to have robbed him also of that.

Carl had returned before any of the other boys or Faith had managed to, and he and Una had found some common ground in the vastness of their futures. Mostly, the others had lives to return to, even if they returned changed. Carl had finished his course at Queens, taught for a year, but the war had taken him before he'd started at Redmond. Neither he nor Una had courses to return to, or, from what he could tell, sweethearts to reunite with. With the others, he felt he must act the part, but Una had gifted him the kindness of not requiring the pretense.

"Good old Four Winds," Carl said to Una, as he surveyed the two couples in front of them, and the road that lead off winding beyond them, "I was so glad to see it hadn't changed a bit when I got back last winter."

Una said nothing, in part as in her estimation it had changed quite a lot. Carl reflected that Una too had changed since 1914. She didn't ask for jovialness from him, but perhaps she deserved his act all the same. So he added:

"Do you know, that at one point while I was in England laid up, I had a sudden very real sense of fear that Mrs. Marshall Elliot had decided to paint her house?"

At that, Una laughed a sweet little laugh, and Carl felt his gloom lift a little.

* * *

Further down the road, Di and Faith were discussing what awaited them.

"Well would you continue nursing?" Di asked.

"O God, no!" Faith replied, vehemently and without the forethought to pretend there was some joke to be had in it.

Di looked at her with slight shock, before wiping the expression away and replying with something more mild. They'd need to keep themselves occupied, Faith until Jem was finished with medical school in two years and could marry, and Di herself indefinitely she supposed.

"I've been looking at typing courses," Faith offered, once Diana had successfully navigated the crisis, "at Redmond. I've the money to put myself through a short course from the V.A.D., and I haven't the patience for teaching anymore."

Di agreed heartily that this made sense, with a wry thought that patience had never really been Faith's strongest suit, and noted the conversation looked about to turn somewhere unexpected. She tucked her little blossoming dream away for consultation some other day and said, "and then I suppose you could stay in Kingsport after!"

"Kingsport, or Charlottetown, or somewhere else," Faith replied, but the levity in her voice rang hollow.

* * *

Rilla had sat herself behind the wheel of fathers model T before the mutual distrust was discovered, and despite Shirley's protests that he himself was a trained pilot and therefore infinitely more qualified, Jem had declared Rilla to be the driver there and Shirley was given the task on their return. Rilla did little to hide her irritation as Shirley insisted on at least starting the engine. It was true that winding the crank was somewhat messy and hard work, but Rilla of 1919 shied away from neither, regardless of what her brothers expected of her.

Jem had been home for longer and had had more time to learn Rilla anew. She still had a little of the romantic tendencies of her younger years but had grown into some of Susan's grim determination in the years that had passed. She seldom talked in italics anymore, even if she did occasionally fall to thinking in them. Jem had come back to the island to find a woman of remarkable self-possession in the place where he'd left the kid sister they used to call spider. If there was someone that the war had unequivocally bettered, he supposed it was Rilla.

Engine finally started, and cranking business completed, Shirley jumped up onto the seat. He'd only gotten back a few weeks before Faith had managed it, and though they'd both been in England for the months after the war, they hadn't seen each other since PEI. He had gone longer than any of them without seeing one or another of the Blythe or Meredith folks, and though he'd written them all dutifully, he'd spent the last month feeling as if he might as well have been around strangers.

For the war, he'd given his ability to remove himself. He had been methodical, calculating, even cold. Which is to say, he had been very very good at what he'd done. It wasn't until after the armistice that he had begun to realise the true cost of what he'd sacrificed./p

Rilla drove remarkably well, he realised, and was familiar with these roads in a way Shirley no longer was, avoiding bumps and holes that would have sent them all temporarily airborne. But as they approached the shore, he noticed that her little white gloves were now tinged a rusty orange. He was glad to see that she had not lost all her frivolity.

Rilla parked and tucked the gloves away in the compartment. She got partway through getting involved in the debate unfolding between Shirley and Jem as to which of them ought to carry the hamper before deciding she trusted Shirley to win the argument. Instead, she picked up the two blankets that rested a top of it and scampering down through the dunes to reach the shore.

There was an ashy pit not far from the path that held the remanence of some other people's bonfire, contained within the vee of two large driftwood logs. There would be nine of them total once their walking group arrived, and she was already scouring for another suitable bench-log to add around the pit when she realised there was no way she'd have time to drag it over before Shirley and Jem arrived.

Learning to share tasks out again had been far more difficult than she'd anticipated. She'd spent years as the only child of the house, and with a war baby to raise at that, that'd she'd forgotten how little was expected of her when her brothers and sisters were all home. For a while, she'd tried to keep up all of the little things she used to do, some of which she'd quite forgotten had been tasks that used to fall to Jem or the twins or Shirley. But after a while, she'd resigned herself to filling only her old jobs and some of the less obtrusive tasks that had been Walter's. She left even the more obvious tasks of Walter's to the boys, realizing they needed things of his to remember him by, just as she did.

As it stood, she only had time to roll both logs back a few feet to leave room at the crux of the vee for an additional seat. There was a seemly looking log around twenty feet from her, and she supposed she could induce Shirley to move it "for" her when the boys appeared.

Jem appeared first from the dunes, carrying the hamper after all, with Shirley trailing him. Shirley's apprehension about the whole situation could not have been more clear if he'd held his arms out ready to catch Jem and his cargo. When they arrived though, they greeted her with a normalcy that could have come from the prewar years. She instructed Shirley to move the selected extra log, and then the three of them sat to wait for the rest of them to show.

* * *

Later, once they and the fire had had enough time to settle, Faith looked around at their little group. She was seated in the sand between Jem's legs, head resting on his good knee, and one hand tangled with his higher up on his thigh. Jerry was joking with Di on the other side of the fire, and he had an arm around Nan, and Una and Shirley were sitting together, looking as content as either ever permitted themselves to outwardly look. Rilla and Carl were giggling at the very edge of their little horseshoe, but not even the gaiety in their laughter could undo how the years had changed them. It wasn't just Carl's patch, or the dainty emerald ring on Rilla's finger, or the way that Rilla's walk seemed solid and determined now, no longer the floaty dance of her girlhood. Their whole childhoods had left them.

Jem and Faith and Jerry and Una and Walter and the twins could not rightly have been described as children at the onset of the war, but Rilla and Shirley and Carl still had been. Rilla hadn't even been 'out' at the onset of the war.

But they had made it here, and Faith felt more in this moment than she had all week that she was finally home. A quiet and queer sort of peace settled in her. There was a stabbing loss in the absence of Walter, that she'd felt curiously throughout the time she'd been back, were she'd forget a moment before realizing anew.p

It was worse, as well, because she'd always been a little ashamed of the lack of patience she'd had for him when they were children, and this shame crystalized a little more every time she re-remembered that he wouldn't come back. They'd been cut from very different cloths, and as Faith had always jumped feet first into everything that came her way, she'd never bothered to find the time to wait around for him. Plus, on a very literal level, he'd talked far too slowly for her and she'd often been overcome with impatience and a desire to hurry him along so they could get back to their mischief.

And now she could never really fix that. Of course, part of the cruelty of an uncompleted life was how many things would never have the time or space to sort themselves out. She hoped though, that the rest of them would have time enough.

* * *

_AN: Ouf okay after four thousand whole words of vamping, there'll be some plot next time, which should be easier once Faith sets off for where I have her going and we're not stuck on a nine-point-of-view existential crisis where none of the characters can figure out how they feel about anything. But they're trying their hardest! _

_Thank you for all the thoughtful comments :) _


	3. Back to Kingsport

Faith smoothed out the quilt on her new bed one final time before sighing and dropping down into the desk chair of her new room and staring out the window. It looked out onto a dark and dreary alleyway, and didn't exactly provide much "scope for the imagination" as the Blythes would say. But the room itself was nice enough, and she was boarding with a young family, who also seemed kinder than required. The house was close to the university, and well within her budget, and that's all she'd really needed.

She'd spent a few weeks in the Glen trying to figure out how she could avoid boarding, but every way she'd found seemed too extreme to justify. Most of the girls she knew back in England who weren't married or about to be had taken flats in little groups of two or three. The girls she'd met from Toronto had done the same, but Kingsport hardly had the same residential opportunities, at least not near the university. The North End had been rebuilt since the explosion, and there were apartments to be had there, but she couldn't justify how far they were from Redmond.

None of the Blythe girls had any reason to be in Kingsport this year, with the twins done with their BAs and Rilla still not having shown any interest in a formal education. With just her and Una here, they couldn't reasonably rent a house, and Faith did not want roommates she didn't already know and trust at all.

The boys were all in the same boarding house down the street, and Una was only a few blocks away, in a boarding house that would suit her well but would have driven Faith up the wall. She was close to Jem and her siblings and she was trying hard to feel more grateful and less frustrated.

* * *

Jem had come to call on her after supper, and the two of them decided to take a ramble around the park near the point. It was the same park they'd frequented in their B.A. years, and like most of the south end of the city, had changed very little in the time since she'd been there last. The day was bright and lovely as a September day could be, and Faith was trying very earnestly to be glad the weather wasn't dreary.

They'd walked a far smaller loop than they used to around the park and managed to not talk about tomorrow almost at all when Jem pulled Faith off the path and towards a dense-enough set of trees. Faith could feel her shoulders unclenching as they wound their way away from the path and safely out of sight. By the time Jem stopped walking and leant against a tree trunk, Faith almost felt as if they really were back at the early part of the decade.

"That's a nice outfit, Faith," Jem said lazily, surveying her, and smiling like the cat that got the cream. He looked more himself than she'd seen him in a week, in a month, in maybe four years.

When they were younger, that smile – or more accurately the intense and physical response Faith always had to it – used to mortify her like nothing else.

"We're past the point of needing to flatter me, James Mathew" Faith replied, rolling her eyes. And then she stalked forwards to kiss him, before they could get stuck in some pedantic argument neither of them were interested in.

His arms came to wrap around her back, as she busied the hand that wasn't in his hair trying to pull his shirt tails from his trousers.

* * *

In the three weeks between their first shore trip and Faith arriving in Kingsport she had been nearly overwhelmed with the unenviable tasks of attempting to simultaneously re-establish herself in the Glen after a year and a half of living out of a meager trunk, and pack for Redmond at the same time. One day about a week before she'd left, Nan and Di had both found their way into Faith and Una's room in the manse, and then quickly begun digging through Faith's closet.

The Blythe twins couldn't reasonably be described as vein, and neither could anyone fault their commitment to the war effort over its course. They'd taken up government suggestion with good humor and grace, and had cut back on frivolity for the years that their boys were at the front. The boys had given themselves for the King and Empire and Canada, and the Blythe twins had given not only their menfolk, but also their time and money to the cause. They had bought victory bonds, had knitted socks until their hands went numb, and had spent long hours at the Kingsport convalescent hospital. For fifty-three long months they had rallied and worked and written and prayed.

But the war was over, and though neither was under any impression that the world could return to the easy one they'd known before, there didn't seem to be any sense in living with the same degree of self sacrifice anymore. Anne Blythe had taught her daughters the joy of beautiful things, and they shared in her belief that it was easier to be good in nice dresses.

They tore apart Faith's wardrobe with good humour and better intentions. Nan had suggestions to help "save and update" nearly everything in it, and Di had hands that worked fast and well. They required little out of Faith and were so evidently amused in their pursuit that her response was one of resigned bemusement.

"Nan, really, I thought I'd tried this one already," Faith sighed with mock exasperation. She and Di had been otherwise occupied trying to inspect and match old lonely stockings and determine which were salvageable.

"Oh, you have, silly, but I've managed to fix the waistline just a leetle and I'd like to be sure it'll fit right now!"

"Fine, do what you will!" Faith threw up her arms in resignation, but she laughed as well.

As Faith was wrestling the dress back on, and Nan preparing to observe her handiwork, Di turned to survey the room, to which they had done thankfully limited damage. As she did, she caught sight of Una Meredith standing at the threshold of the room.

"Una!" she exclaimed, "are you all packed for Kingsport?"

"Quite nearly – but I've had far longer to prepare than Faith has!" Una replied.

Di had a hard time telling with Una when things were a diversion or an honest truth. There were times where Diana tried hard with Una – and it was always difficult to tell if it was received with gratitude or just good humour. Di and Nan were very close, but there were times when Di felt Nan's beauty and creative talents as almost a personal affront. She had her own skills, and she loved her twin intensely, but Di knew well as anyone that you could still find a bored and quiet heartbreak in being overshadowed just as well as she knew that she would never ever admit to the fact. What Di could never really tell was if Una ever really suffered from any of Di's own personal insecurities.

Eventually Di replied: "Well that makes sense, and your dresses are all very sweet – you've also been so much more attentive than our Faith here! But let us know if you'd like a hand with anything – Nan and I are off to be lowly schoolmarms again – but you girls are back for Kingsport! We wouldn't want any of those Bluenoses thinking we Islander's aren't up to fashions!"

Una shook her head, smiled and then walked away. Her dresses would never be fashionable, and she could never be or want to be Faith. Di let her be, but was still hard pressed to tell if she should have pushed for more. Una, for her part almost wished the twins had pushed, because though she could never measure to Faith's easy charm, she was nearly her equal in beauty, and in the next world she might have found some kindness in prettier things.

Meanwhile, the dress had been deemed appropriate by Nan's exacting tastes and was indicated for one of Faith's half packed trunks.

* * *

When Jem wrote saying he had gotten some leave and would be back in England in two weeks, Faith had all but run to the Matron at the next opportunity to ask for the same ten days, or as much overlap as could be managed. She was more successful than she'd hoped she would be, and managed to secure eight of the same days once she'd explained her fiancé would be back those days. Or, more accurately, once she'd explained Jem's leave and the hopes that she could go stay with an aunt she had nearby. Had she been the more observant type, she might have noticed the matron's sly smile, who had little doubts about the fictitiousness of Miss Meredith's ne'er-before mentioned relative.

Faith had spent most of her last year at Redmond doing the required domestic hospital service and she'd been reasonably prepared when she'd arrived fresh from Devonshire Hall to the 3rd General Hospital in Wandsworth. She'd met the initial challenges of hospital work in England with the same attitude as she'd met every other challenge in her life. If there was one thing Faith Meredith knew, it was that hard work, good will, and a little charm could go a long way. Thankfully, Faith was never vain enough to quite comprehend how some of her other qualities had their ways of helping her out as well.

Most of the other girls she was with were either from England or Newfoundland, and the boys who filled their wards were of a similar background. Most of the Newfoundland girls were glad to be helping "their boys" but Faith was quite thankful she wasn't running the risk of having to tend to her brothers or any of the other boys she knew from the Glen or Kingsport. The worst days she'd had while at the Convalescent Hospital in Kingsport were when boys she'd been to college with found themselves in her ward. There was no dignity in changing bandages on the thigh stump of a boy who you once hadn't had space for on a dance card.

As it stood, the ebb and flow of her hospital work was more or less dependant on the happenings over in France, and the Matron knew even better than Faith how cruel and pointless this war could be to people. So leave had been given, and Faith had awaited the fated eight days eagerly.

Jem had written her to meet him at a tea-room in Notting Hill, on the second day of his leave and the first of hers, and to "not worry about doing any planning, as he had it all sorted."

With that little information and nearly three whole years between them, she'd set off north across the Wandsworth Bridge, jumping on and off buses through Fulham, Chelsea and Kensington before walking through Kensington Gardens. A man in khaki was leaning against a lamp post halfway up the street, and she spent a nerve wracking three hundred yards trying to figure out if it was him. Should she not know him?

Then, the man pushed off the post, and took off his cap to run a hand through his curls. Her stomach dropped as she took a deep fortifying breath. Two steps later, she had broken into a full run, headless of the people around her, or the angry horn from the cab who's path she had cut neatly across. Thankfully, he spotted her just before she threw her arms around his neck. She knew him, and he was here.

* * *

"Okay, so you don't want us to get married, you just want us to pretend that we're married so that we can…" and here she trailed off, and she could feel her face heat.

She had not realised that conversations this excruciating could still happen. They had been sitting having tea in the location Jem had suggested when he had pulled two plain gold bands out of his pocket, and then promptly declared that he wouldn't marry her until they were back on Canadian soil.

Jem made a series of noises, some of which appeared to be protesting, and some of which were clearly just a product of sever discomfort.

"It's not, I didn't mean to…" he started, once words began to come to him again. "I'd never want anything from you that you didn't choose to give me freely, Faith."

"Oh, I know that well enough, Jem," she said, not a little impatiently, though the reminder was still reassuring, "besides, it's historically been my bad judgement we've had to worry about."

"I've had plenty of cold and lonely nights these last few years where I've been grateful enough for your bad judgement," Jem replied, with an indulgent half-laugh, before continuing: "But the war's taken enough from the others back home, I'm not going to take a wedding from them once we're back as well. Susan would have my hide, and Rilla would never forgive us either."

Faith didn't ask about what the war had taken from him, she'd seen enough in the wards to know just how much many men lost, in spirit and in soul. As she studied him from across their little table, she thought she saw his father as much as her childhood sweetheart. It was funny how she hadn't quite reconciled the man sitting in front of her, who looked every day of twenty five and then some, with the man she'd spent the last three years writing letters to, or the boy she'd spent the years before running through Rainbow Valley with.

"Stuff Susan and Rilla and their wedding, I want to be yours and by all rights I would have been by now if it hadn't been for all of this ridiculous business," she gestured vaguely around the tea house, as if these unsuspecting rooms were themselves a representation of the senselessness of three years of war. She'd spent pages and pages, and many long nights beside that, writing him things a fair bit bolder than what she'd just said, but she still felt quite ridiculous as she said it. There were many things that sounded romantic on paper that just sounded raw and desperate in person.

"Hey, look at me," Jem said, taking her hand, "I want you to be mine too. And I want to be yours. Really yours, not the Canadian Army's, or Redmond Medical School's, or anyone else's. Just yours, Faith. We don't have to pretend to be married if you don't want to, I just thought it would be the best way of making sure we didn't get any trouble this week."

Faith considered this a minute, before agreeing. The plan made a fair bit of sense now that he'd chosen to actually explain it properly. Besides, weren't the papers back home constantly complaining of what a difficult time the government was having figuring out who was and wasn't married? Clearly, there was a lot more leeway than they'd been led to believe back in the comfort of Four Winds. This didn't feel like a transgression any greater than any she'd already signed up to commit - alone with Jem, without a chaperon, or even a soul who knew where they'd gone. The impropriety of it all was more likely to bother Jem than her, especially now when they were somewhere where her behaviour had no baring on her father's reputation. Besides, they'd managed to be quite improper before, even with the consequences. With these thoughts, she added to her agreement with an impish grin, "so this isn't about sucking off then?"

"Good lord, Faith," Jem said, choking on a poorly timed sip of tea, and his face going nearly the colour of his hair, "where on Earth did you learn language like that?"

"Oh, you couldn't pay me to repeat some of the things your boys say in our wards," she said, laughing easily at his reaction. Making shocking statements was much easier than talking about the logistics of marriage.

She leant forwards to pick up the smaller of the two bands that had been laying on the table and slipped it onto her finger. Eight days together was more than she could have hoped for, and if this was all she got then she was going to make the most of it.

* * *

The evening before she left for Kingsport, she'd accidentally found herself in the confidence of Rilla Blythe, something she was absolutely certain had never happened before. She'd run down to Rainbow Valley in an attempt to avoid the last-minute dashing around that was happening at the manse. Nan and Rosemary were fretting over Jerry's trunks, and he looked like it was taking increasing effort to minimize his irritation. Una had finished her packing and was helping Carl. Carl was standing looking out the window and appeared totally impassive.

She had been lying on her back looking up at the canopy of rustling leaves. When she'd arrived, the sun was high enough that she could watch it flash between the overlapping leaves, but at some point the night had begun to take over. She was now engaged in trying to determine the outlines of different branches against the inky sky, tracing them mentally over and over again.

"It's got to be awfully damp down there" Rilla said, appearing in Faith's field of vision as she peered over her.

"I guess I was too busy daydreaming to notice," Faith replied, and, revelry interrupted, made to stand up. She took Rilla's proffered hand and pulled herself up, shaking out her skirts once she had.

Faith had expected Rilla to then continue to wander down the grove, but instead she had walked a few short steps to a felled log and taken a seat. Rilla was sitting primly, hands folded over the top of a little diary that she had presumably come down to write in, and looking at Faith expectantly.

With nothing better to do, and no more desire to return to the manse, Faith took a seat across from Rilla.

"Are you excited to go back to Redmond?"

"Not especially, but a girl's got to do something other than just wait around to get married," Faith replied, with typical candour and even more typical lack of forethought.

Rilla supressed a wince.

Faith reflected for the millionth time since she'd been back that there was a lot to be said for the upsides of letter writing, where impulsivity was much easier to wrangle with.

"It is funny, isn't it? How little there is to do all of a sudden?" Rilla replied, after a moment. Thinking of the ongoing chaos at the manse, Faith couldn't truthfully agree at all, but she had enough tact to nod along.

"And there's no real point in me going to take some course or another when Ken and I'll be married in the spring," Rilla continued, "though it's funny to think this'll likely be my last winter on the Island!"

Privately, Faith thought this being Rilla's last winter on the Island was very far down the list of rarities about her upcoming marriage to Kenneth Ford. Faith had been informed of the engagement by a hastily added postscript on one of Jem's letters:

"Say, did you know that Rilla's been engaged to Ken Ford for half the war? Mother and Shirley apparently knew this whole time and nobody ever thought to mention it before I walked into them kissing on the veranda a few days after he got to Four Winds. The things you miss while being stuck in the mud in Flanders! – JMB"

At the time, stuck in the middle of the influenza crisis in London, and ruing the strange turn of events that had led to Faith being stuck in England once Jem had safely returned to Canada, it had been hard to accurately judge the bizarreness of this little tidbit. The letter in question had heavily featured Bruce's antics and a few extended quotes from baffling and hilarious conversations between Cousin Sophia and Susan, and all of it had seemed perfectly alien to Faith. It wasn't until she got back home, where everyone else apparently saw nothing odd in this arrangement, that she had begun to be truly confused about it.

"Are you excited for the wedding then?" Faith said, scrambling for something neutral, as she wondered how on earth she was going to get through this conversation without revealing her unending skepticism.

"Oh, I couldn't care less about the wedding – I think Miranda Pyror's cured me of my love for them entirely – but it'll be lovely to be married at last"

"Can you say "at last" when you're not yet twenty-one?" Faith replied, once she was quite certain this wouldn't come out sounding as caustic as it had when she'd first thought it.

"I suppose not, but Ken's twenty-six, and I'll be better suited to being a wife than I would be to anything else," Rilla replied, with a Blythe bluntness that had made Ingleside many friends and more than a few critics.

"Jem'll be twenty-eight before we get married, I guess"

"Same age Dad was when he and Mum got married – and I suppose you'll be the same age Mum was, more or less" Rilla mused, "though I suppose you're better placed to manage along without being married than we are."

Faith had absolutely no idea what that could mean, and clearly her confusion as this was noticed by Rilla.

"I just mean that you saw far more of the horrors of it than I did – I was barely ever in a hospital even in Charlottetown the whole time! You know, I don't think I really knew how terrible the whole thing was until Ken was back. Jem and Shirley are bricks, and they've very nearly kept up their charming letter strategy since they've been back. I half wonder if Dad had a word with them about not upsetting me or Mother."

"But Ken's not like that with you?" Faith questioned, genuinely surprised. She did not think she'd live to see the day where Kenneth Ford was anything other than a slightly cheeky playmate and an even cheekier young man.

"Not at all, not since the spring," replied Rilla, "It's been a relief to have him confide in me like that, and I know the time is doing us good, now that we don't have to concern ourselves with censors or the worry it's the last letter that ever gets sent or anything! But you've probably had that with Jem for far longer, what with being in England and all. Well that, and you and Jem were always proper chums even before you were sweethearts."

Faith was reminded then just why she was so suspect of Ken's character, and it had a lot to do with his wildly unorthodox methods of matchmaking, but that was an issue for another time, and also definitely not something she would be discussing with Rilla.

"I suppose I have got a fairly decent idea what Jem's been through because of the nursing," Faith said slowly, in response to Rilla. She suspected that this conversation was getting away from her a little.

"Well, yes, of course," Rilla said, nearly impatient, "but I imagine Jem's leg isn't the only thing that bothers him, and that it's been a great help to have you around to talk with about it."

Rilla appeared to be waiting for some confirmation. Faith mumbled some affirmative, because she had no interest in revealing to Rilla that she had been over-estimated in this regard.

"At least you and Jem are likely to be in the same town the whole time left that you're engaged though," Rilla said.

"That's true."

"Still, it's a relief to talk to someone about this! With Miss Oliver so far away now, I haven't half the confidants that I used to," Rilla smiled.

Faith had a reasonably good idea why Rilla had come to her instead of Una or Di, but she couldn't really fathom why this was a conversation she wasn't having with Nan. But, she was worried if she asked she might learn even more about the relationships around her, and she'd had close to enough for the day.

If Ken and little Rilla had spoken candidly as she claimed, then there was an alarming chance that they were well on their way to greater maturity than Faith and Jem. Between that, and the hilarious new reminder that she did have Ken to thank for her and Jem getting their act together, she left the valley completely confused about entirely different things than she'd entered it being.

* * *

She dropped Jem off at his new boarding house on the way back from the park. She kissed his cheek, chaste now, and squeezed his hand as she agreed to meet him for lunch after they were both signed up for classes tomorrow. She walked away feeling subdued and thinking, with no small amount of longing, of the cigarette she had waiting for her on her new desk. Clearly, today was not the day that she would live up to the new standard Rilla Blythe had set for her, but she could always hope for tomorrow.

In the meanwhile, she had to focus on how on earth she was going to get herself, and all her assorted siblings, through registration tomorrow.

* * *

_AN: Thank you for all the lovely comments! I'm glad other people got a giggle out of Shirley and Rilla being ridiculous. _

_I've been having a lot of fun reading "A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service" which is a 2012 collection of papers about Canadian and Newfoundland women and the First World War. Lots of it is obviously a huge bummer, but it's also super interesting. There's lots of stuff in there about how women's roles changed throughout and after the war, as well as a bunch of research into VADs and how marriage and mourning cultures changed! Anyways, some of that research is in here, and some of it is ... not ... mostly because I'd decided I wanted Faith in Wandsworth even though I can't find any proof that there were Canadian VADs there (but a lot of them really were from Newfoundland - and some of the Newfoundland VADs did talk about how glad they were to be looking after "their" boys.)_


	4. Game Plans and College Politics

The morning of registration, Faith went through all the required procedures in a slight daze, answering questions mechanically, filling it forms without really thinking too long on it.

She'd had to ask for a new form once when she'd accidentally begun to write the address of the little house she'd run with the Blythe twins, and she'd laughed to herself a little as she ticked the box declaring herself unmarried. Otherwise, the whole process went without incident, and she was reminded, again, that she'd really only been gone two school years from Redmond.

Across the quad, her three siblings had approached their registration with more trepidation.

Una Meredith was attempting to fill in her forms without fully taking her eyes off her two brother, three tables down. While the forms didn't exactly have any questions that required real thought on them, this was having rather notable effects on her penmanship, and under other circumstances she might have found herself rather embarrassed to turn in the unevenly written paper. Instead, she was too concerned with watching as Jerry touched Carl's shoulder a fourth time in what she knew was supposed to be a reassuring gesture.

She went to wait at a bench for her brothers to come through their registration and was lost in daydream when someone sat down next to her. Carl looked to be finishing up, and Jerry was nowhere to be seen.

"Well that was exhausting, and classes haven't even started yet," groused Jem Blythe, his attempt at a smile coming through as more of a grimace, "Here, let me see your schedule."

He passed Una his own class schedule and looked through hers. Jem wasn't Una's older brother, at least not yet, but there were times in which he appeared to forget he wasn't everyone's older brother. Una had even seen him older-brother Jerry.

"Oh boy – your courses look way more complicated than I expected," Jem said. From someone other than Jem Blythe, it might have sounded explicitly cruel, and if someone other than Una Meredith had been on the receiving end of the comment, it most likely would have been taken as quite the snub. But Una knew that his occasional carelessness was almost always eclipsed by his genuine good-heartedness.

"I've heard some of the women have quite a difficult time with their first year," Una replied mildly. *

"Well, I'm sure you'll have no trouble – you Merediths have always been a smart lot," Jem said, before adding, on further assessment of her schedule, "Oh, they gave you the professor some of the nurses get for anatomy. From what I hear, he's a bit of a piece of work. Maybe you can find one of the girls who's taken his class before and see if they still have notes, that might help."

Jem – five years into his Redmond education – and with the war years, almost a decade since he'd been a freshman was in a good place to reassure Una. They talked school for a while – with Jem's easy confidence and even easier generosity helping bolster Una's spirits for the semester.

* * *

Jerry was very grateful for Mary Vance.

He had been grateful for her before, and he had no doubt he would be again, but he had not expected to be grateful for her today, when he was supposed to be registering for courses at Redmond.

But grateful he was in this moment.

"It's a shame you got involved in all this war business so early, Mr Meredith," the current administrator he was in front of was saying to him, "if you'd waited until they decided force all our young men off, you could have been done with half this law degree already."

Jerry was not exactly certain what an appropriate response to this could possibly be, but it wasn't the first time he'd heard the sentiment today. Everyone he'd spoken to today had either thanked him for his service, and then informed him they could not or would not help him, or had implied that his war involvement had been solely to cause them administrative difficulties.

Without Mary's keen ears and even more keen interest in repeating what exactly she heard, this sentiment might have come as a total surprise to Jerry. But Mary had long ago taken it upon herself to inform the manse inhabitants of just what exactly anyone in the town was saying about them. In this way, Jerry had come to know that at least some of the McAllisters and a few of the Reeses held similarly disparaging views of how he'd spent the last few years. It rankled a little bit, in the same way that a persistent fly could provoke significant enough irritation. But he'd had flies in the trenches, and he'd learnt to deal with them then too.

"Sir, I assure you I intend to be as committed to this degree now as I was defending Canada from Prussianism," Jerry replied evenly.

This comment was not received with especially good grace. Evidently, this administrator was not especially concerned with the effects of Prussianism.

"I understand that you are attempting to take a more extensive course load this semester," the administrator eventually replied, "I suppose I can provide my approval of this, on the condition that you do not request any additional considerations. If you commit to taking on more work than is recommended, we will not provide any accommodations for any issues you may run into from doing this."

As Jerry had enlisted right before the start of his last year of his BA, the college had allowed his service to count as transferable credits, and he and all the other boys who'd enlisted with less than a year left had been granted BAs on their return. However, the Law School had required two prerequisite classes for admission, that Jerry had intended on taking in that final year. In an act of supposed generosity, he had been admitted to the Law program without them, on the condition that he take the two courses in his first year. This should have been a relatively straight forwards process, especially given that it had come at the suggestion of the department, but straight forwards it very much was not.

Still, Jerry was relieved, and thanked the administrator in a way he hoped sounded genuine. He had engaged in a fair bit of lengthy and deeply uninteresting correspondence with the faculty administration to try to avoid this very situation, to no avail. As it was, he was tired of standing.

If he got sent to one more office "just the other side of campus" he was going to start seriously considering giving up on this whole thing and going to shake out his old teaching licence. Maybe Nan would let him become her assistant. That sounded like a lot more fun.

"With this signature, the only thing that's left is to go see the registrar – who is in the Amhurst University Building."

The Amhurst Building was, of course, four city blocks away. **

* * *

"Dear old Redmond, the only place on earth that hasn't changed one bit," Jem said, with the slightest twinge of bitterness, as he and Faith walked down to get supper together. Faith had found him sitting with Una and Carl, and Jem had made some attempt to get the other two to join them for the meal, but they'd been determined to wait for Jerry.

"Well, isn't that what we love about academia?" Faith joked, "I, for one, was not assigned a single piece of literature that wasn't written before our parents were born in my whole BA."

"That I suppose they'll have to change now," conceded Jem, "or, at least the poetry they'll have to change."

There was a lull in the conversation then, and she was reasonably sure his thoughts had gone in the same direction as hers and was thinking on The Piper.

God, how she couldn't stand that piece any longer.

"I hope that's not all that the war changes," Faith said, finally.

* * *

When The Piper had first been published, Faith hadn't started her St John's Ambulance courses yet. She read it, and thought it sweet and poignant, and was happy and proud of Walter. He had been miserable his year at Redmond, and melancholy in a way Faith didn't know that a Blythe could be, given their very apt propensity towards blitheness. But joining the rest of the boys, writing poetry that was widely published – it seemed like he'd found where he was supposed to be.

The Piper didn't become bizarre to her until she began to hear other people talk about it. The Piper had been such a fixture of their Rainbow Valley days, and it was strange to hear other people, who weren't Blythes or Merediths or Mary Vance talk about him in the way they would when they were children.

She still remembered vividly the first time Walter had talked to them about their Piper. About how very sincere he'd seemed. About how Di had tried to declare the girls' intent to follow them. About how certain Walter had been that they wouldn't be able to join them. Faith had known, abstractly, at that point, that the rules were different for girls than they were for boys. But they weren't girls and boys when they were together. They were real friends: kindred spirits, race that knew Joseph-y kinds of friends. And she'd been surprised to find it hurt her, that Walter had taken them all for people who couldn't or wouldn't follow the man that would take the others away.

Had taken them for girls, and meant some difference in that. As a child, and even still, she'd had no specific complaint in being a girl, just as she'd had no sustained concern being a minister's child. But the dividing line that it had run through her playfellows with Walter's piper had done some hidden injury to her poor little self.

And Walter had been almost, nearly, mostly right. The girls hadn't been able to follow the Piper. Instead, Jem and Jerry had gone first, and Faith had lead Di and Nan and Walter back to Kingsport in their stead. It was Walter's premonition, and still-childish Jem's hope, that the piper would call the boys away all those years ago. When they heard the piping at that shore party, and in the weeks that followed, Faith had been nearly overcome with frustration, that only half of them were called. She knew the Blythe girls had shared her indignance to varying degrees. Even Rilla had seemed to emerge from her fourteen-year-old fancies to be frustrated.

But by the time she'd followed the war to England, she no longer yearned for the Piper. The Piper had already killed Walter, and a number of other Glen and Redmond boys besides. It had taken young men she knew, and young men she had supposed she would eventually know. Friends of Jem's that he'd said, lazily, that she would 'meet eventually.' Boys she'd never cared for but assumed she could count on to run into in ten or twenty years somewhere.

The first few months, when they all thought it would still be good fun, she'd been jealous of the adventure. The next year, when it became clear it wasn't to be fun at all, she'd been jealous of the purpose the boys had, while they sat back at home and stitched and prayed to God that the telegrams that day went to another house. The year that had followed that one, she'd felt nothing but heartsick. In 1916, the Piper mocked her.

A week after she'd picked up the telephone in Kingsport, and been given the task of telling the twins the news from Ingleside, she'd been walking out of a lecture – stuck mechanically going through the motions of her life - when she'd heard two girls in front of her talking:

"Say, did you know that Pvt. Blythe who wrote the poem, the one about the Piper, was killed last week?" One girl said, with only slightly more gravity to the inflection than if she had been discussing the weather.

"Blythe? Not Blythe on the football team, from last year?" the gossip's companion replied.

"No no, that one is James Blythe. Walter Blythe is the one who died – though I supposed they were related. Maybe brothers? Or cousins?" the first girl replied.

Faith had managed to get away from them then. She must have had to push past them, although she had no recollection of doing so. To hear her life discussed like that, by people who could never know or care about Walter. Who couldn't even tell the difference between Walter and Jem. Who didn't know they were brothers – that they were the kinds of best friends that only brothers could be.

The day before, she'd received the shortest letter she'd ever had from Jem. It was an almost bland note, letting her know that he knew what had happened. She'd read it twice, and then spent twenty minutes sitting in the washroom. She had not actually been sick, but it had seemed like a real possibility for all of those twenty minutes. She'd felt worse once she'd failed to manifest her grief and had left the washroom to pull dinner together for the twins – who after all still had to eat.

* * *

Sitting at lunch, Jem appeared to be plotting the course of their semester out. He was plotting with the intensity of a good football captain, or more probably, an army officer.

"Jerry's taking too many courses, so we'll have to see to it that he remembers to leave his desk sometimes, and goes outside."

Faith nodded absently.

"And Una's courses look rough – do still know any of the nurses from the Kingsport Hospital?" He asked.

This seemed like quite the non-sequitur to Faith, though she replied that she might well.

"Good, maybe they can help our Una if she needs it. Carl should be alright – Queen's is good preparation for first year here, and he sailed through that. Shirley, I have no clue about. He's the only one of us who did the third year at Queen's – and I honestly have no idea what they teach you in that. Mind, the RAF seemed to think he knew what was going on. So that should also be fine." ***

Jem was ever the consummate older brother. Faith was sure he had the others under control. She was far more concerned about him. If Jem was going to try and keep everyone else afloat, then Faith supposed it was up to her to keep the two of them going.

* * *

* Domestic Science courses varied a fair bit across Canada in the early 20th century. They were often instated in places that had agricultural colleges and seen as a sort of equivalent vocational training for women. Some courses were run for women who already had teaching licences and these classes were supposed to train these women to become domestic science teachers in elementary and high schools, while other programs were aimed at women looking to become professional housekeepers, often in hotels or hospitals. These programs were often attended by women in their middle age, who often had dependents and a limited prior education - often just up to fourth or fifth book. Both types of courses often surprised women in attendance as especially the first year had quite a bit of general science. Food Chemistry, Anatomy and were all common first year courses, that a lot of students struggled with! See Mary Wilson's "Certified Women: Professional Program Curriculum at the Macdonald Institute for Domestic Science in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, 1903-1920" & R Stamp's "Teaching Girls their" God Given Place in Life": The Introduction of Home Economics in Schools" which give an overview of the beginnings of the domestic science movement in Ontario - and I think help to highlight some of the class and gender tensions inherent in the initial programming.

** Field Marshal Amhurst was the first British Governor General of what would become Canada. He designed the plan to beat the French in the Seven Year's War, and a bunch of stuff in the US and Canada is named after him (including a town in Nova Scotia.) Also, he was really into indigenous genocide - so Montreal finally renamed the street named after him earlier this month. (The town in Nova Scotia is thinking of following suite.) As far as I know, there isn't necessarily any Amhurst buildings at any Canadian institutions, but there are a lot of ugly chapters of Canadian history that are easy to overlook.

*** Shirley continues to be a mystery! But Stella took the third year at Queens, and the numbers still don't clock out at all if Shirley also took it, but it makes me feel better about things, so!


	5. Career Women

There were no more bandages.

There were no more bandages, but the boy in front of her needed his bandage changed regardless. As Faith looked around her to see if there might be an orderly somewhere who could help her, a dreadful red colour bloomed through the boy's existing cloths.

He, who had earlier been so sedate, began to moan, and soon his moans turned to real screams. With no other options, Faith did the only thing she could think to do and reached down to begin to tear a strip from the bottom of her skirts. As the fabric ripped away, it seemed to transform instantly into real bandages, to her relief.

She managed to replace his old bandage with her newly acquired one one. The bleeding seemed to be stemmed, and the boy had fallen quiet again. Relieved, she moved on to her next patient.

She had gotten four patients down when the first began to cry again. Eventually, his cries were such that she couldn't ignore them in good conscious anymore, and so she returned to him. The whole bed he lay in was now a deep crimson, and the boy's face was pale as pale could be. She yelled out for help and went to pull another strip from her dress.

She was about to begin changing the leg dressing she had changed not five minutes before when she realized that, improbably, this had remained a bright white. Instead, the blood appeared to be coming from the soldier's abdomen.

She had felt sure they were in the London 3rd, but she realized as she glanced around again that the room was in fact the old Glen Schoolroom. When she looked back down to the body before her, the boy began to speak:

"Remember the corner I'd like, Faith, in the old Methodist graveyard? Put me there, won't you?"

The boy didn't look anything like Jerry, especially, but he didn't look anything like anyone for that matter. Still, she knew the boy was Jerry, somehow.

Now she was beginning to really panic, more than she could ever remember doing. Her dress wouldn't rip, and the blood seeping from Jerry's wounds were beginning to flood the schoolroom-turned-hospital. As the blood level rose up above her ankles, the other beds began to fall away, until it was just her, holding her hands over Jerry's wounds, swearing fluently.

Everything continued to drop away from her, until she herself was falling.

And then finally, she woke up.

* * *

There was a swooping feeling in her stomach, and her heart was hammering away.

She'd spent the first minute she was awake trying to catch her breath and figure out where on earth she was.

The shadowy belongings in the room appeared slowly around her, visible in the slight purple light that was peaking through the curtains. As her heartbeat came back down to normal, she became more aware of the cold sweat she found herself in. While the details of the dream faded away from her, the general panic took a lot longer. And as she began to swim from the panic, her physical discomfort became clearer.

She tossed and turned, but eventually, she gave going back to sleep up as a bad job and decided she may as well be up for the day. She had coursework and correspondence to catch up on, and she had little interest in lying there thinking about things that hadn't happened, and even less interest in thinking about the things that had.

She'd left a letter to Rosemary unanswered for a few days now and had meant to write Bruce something or another soon as well. After that, she supposed it wouldn't hurt to go through a course textbook to review some of its content. It was funny, how much less correspondence she now had. Without a war, or other great catastrophe, she had no reason to be writing Rilla or Mrs Blythe, for example.

* * *

"Coffee, dear?"

Jem mumbled his assent, and half stumbled – still sleep bleary, with his bad leg stiff from the night – to the large sturdy table in the corner of the kitchen that the boys would breakfast at. He was almost sat when he noticed that Carl was already perched on one of the chairs.

Mrs Brown place a cup of coffee down in front of him, and he focused on thanking her properly, with the best smile he could manage.

Carl was pale, and he was shaking one of his legs under the table absent-mindedly. Jem decided to give himself the length of the cup of coffee to decide if he would inquire as to why Carl was down here so early. Then, he'd decide if Carl wanted asking or not.

Jem was used to being the first of the boys down in the morning, normally around half five or so. Most of the time when he woke up, he'd try and settle himself back down, but often by the third or fourth time in the night it would be at an almost civilised time – at which point he could give up and instead come down and establish silent residency at the kitchen table.

He'd been in similar habits at Ingleside this spring and summer, and eventually had learnt to use the extra morning hours to their best. By the time the sun had fully risen, he would be prepared to meet the day without quaking.

From his customary seat in the boarding house kitchen, Jem had a view out into the little back garden. He couldn't see the sunrise from here, but he could watch the pink-yellow light change the palate of the garden. As the sky lightened, the two rose bushes in his eyeline would unblur and sharpen. It seemed almost as if they came alive with the day. On the first cup of coffee, he could only see their outline, but by the second cup, the sun would be up enough for him to track some of the small birds that passed their days hopping through the garden. By the end of his hour morning vigil, the splotchy yellow and greenness of the rose bush leaves would be plain to see.

The hour gave the garden time to transition from shadowy and unknown to imperfect and alive. And it should be noted that these rose bushes were truly unfortunate beasts. Unruly and poorly tamed, it was near impossible to tell what colour roses the gangly bushes were attempting to produce. It was clear that whatever the attempted colour, these unfortunate plants were falling short of their potential. Regardless, Jem had developed a quite the fondness for them over his first few weeks back in Kingsport.

It was around this second cup, the bird enlightening stage, that Shirley presented himself to the table.

"You Island boys are all real early risers!" Mrs Brown said, as Shirley poured himself a cup of coffee, "I suppose the farm work makes you all honest like that."

This was a claim that Mrs Brown fondly made a few times a week. By general unspoken agreement, none of the boys had made any real move to correct her. Mrs Brown was born and raised in Kingsport and had traveled out of Nova Scotia only twice – once to Montreal ("Beautiful, but so many French folks!") and once to Boston ("Beautiful, but so many Yankees!").

She appeared to have a very quaint picture of Prince Edward Island, but while Jem knew Faith would have had no problem pointing out that Nova Scotia had nearly the same share of agriculture, he was happy to have her believe this the reason for their early rising.

And Jem and Shirley and the Meredith boys were indeed the only islanders in the boarding house. But they were also the only boys who'd served. They also made up half of all the boarders. The other four boys were all young – seventeen or just gone eighteen – and at twenty-seven Jem appeared ancient to them. Even Shirley and Carl, who Jem perpetually thought of as children, were old to the other boys.

"Jerry is a born farmer, the best of all of us, and he's normally the last one down," Shirley replied dryly, expression the picture of sincerity.

Mrs Brown nodded, but her expression remained slightly perplexed as she continued on with her work.

* * *

Nan Blythe peddled her bicycle comfortably over the _eight miles from Bright River. It was a pretty road, running along between snug farmsteads, with now and again a bit of balsamy fir wood to drive through or a hollow where wild plums hung out their filmy bloom._ *

She was Avonlea-bound, on a Saturday day-trip to visit her Uncle Davy Keith and his family, and then stop by for tea with Dora Andrews at Green Gables.

Her first two months as Principal of the High School at Bright River had treated her well enough, and she'd settled into a comfortable, if monotonous, routine. She had three weekend trips planned between the start of the school year and the Christmas holidays – one back to the Glen St. Mary, one to go see Di at her school, and one to Charlottetown, where Jerry would meet her for the weekend. She had been to the Glen last weekend – and spent her whole trip in Rilla's orbit, flipping through Eaton's catalogues and jokingly plotting and planning Rilla's Toronto life.

"Oh yes, I would like to spend 350$ on this horrible dress!" Rilla had declared, in her highest and mightiest tone, before dramatically flipping the page open to a truly horrendous spread.

"But what will the other society ladies say if you don't have it!" Nan had cackled in response.

"Oh, I suppose some of them will have plenty to say, but thankfully, as long as Ken's happy with me, I don't care one bit!" Rilla declared lying back on her bed, her face the picture of contentment.

Nan supposed then might've been the time to delve into some deeper confidence with Rilla, but it was nice to have this carefree chumminess, and Nan couldn't bring herself to mar it with mundane reality and responsibility. And so, she had passed all her time in gay and frivolous planning, to the kind amusement of both their parents. Before the war, Gilbert might have made a comment on their idleness, but now he was firmly in Anne's camp. There would be time for struggle and lost and work and sorrow again, but it didn't have to be right now.

Every Saturday barring the last though, she had she had taken herself down to Avonlea. Her bicycle rides allowed her to observe how the trees changed through the fall. She had watched them grow heavy with fruit, branches bowed, and had seen as the burden became too much. The wild fruit had fallen, the rest been harvested, and the branches returned mostly to their untaxed positions, before starting to shed their leaves. It appeared to Nan that, duty done, they could finally give up.

Nan had been glad to take the school in Bright River, in part because of its proximity to Avonlea, which still possessed a sort of shimmering otherworldliness to her. Houses of their kin lined the few streets in the village, and most places in Avonlea held sweet memories of her and her siblings in their younger years. These were layered with the stories, both told and imagined, of her parents, and the Wrights, and the Keith twins.

She had been to Avonlea only twice during the war, and those had both been trips of galvanising productiveness. She, Di, and Anne Cordelia had spent a week helping with the harvest on the Wright's farm in 1916, and in the summer of 1918, she and Dora Andrews and both of Dora's daughters had spent a bracing fortnight lending a hand to any and all the men in the village who could use it.

Now, Anne Cordelia and Dora's daughters were gone. Anne Cordelia and Dora's eldest had both moved to Charlottetown with their husbands, and Dora's younger daughter had moved to Spencervale with hers.

"Isn't it sad to be here when all your friends are married?"

Amelia, Davy's youngest daughter, was a boisterous girl of just fifteen. She was also the only one of his three children to have inherited his characteristic combination of lack of tact and insatiable curiosity. Thankfully, schoolmarm Nan was used to how intrusively careless teenagers could be, and in this case, she knew there was genuine goodheartedness behind even the most unfortunate questions.

"Not especially, honey," She said, inspecting one of the strawberry apples they had picked earlier in the day from the old Blythe Orchard that the Keiths now owned, "besides, I know I'm only waiting two more years."

Amelia considered this, and then said, "Yes, it must be much harder for Di to visit. Does she still not have a beau?"

"Noo – I don't believe so," Nan said slowly, around a mouthful of apple – wondering if she should put in a word in her twin's defense.

"Good for her – all the ladies here keep telling me that boys get more appealing but I think they're all full of lies," Amelia declared, before adding, with a sniff, "besides, I've seen most of their husbands and I think I can do quite well enough without boys if those are supposed to be good examples of what they turn out like."

Nan choked back a laugh, but, thankful she didn't have to be in teacher mode, didn't voice any disagreement.

"Yes, I think you'll find Di quite agrees with you. Besides, I believe she might be plotting becoming a career woman of some sort."

"A career woman!" Amelia cried, delighted.

* * *

Clerical courses felt very different from her BA classes.

Her early BA classes had been filled with kindred-spirits types of young people, drawn to the university by a love of fun and fancy and sometimes also learning. She'd had lectures filled with spirited debates under inspiring professors, and other lectures occupied by sitting next to one of the Blythes in the back and trying to count how many of their fellow students had managed to quietly nod off.

There'd been lots of students like them, following in their parents' footsteps to higher education and a temporary escape from their smaller towns, as well as a fair few who were forging their own paths to university, like Dr and Mrs Blythe both had. There had also, of course, been several wealthy bluenoses who seemed to view their BAs as an opportunity to cause as much of a nuisance as they could before inheriting the family companies. But even these irritating classmates had had a sheen of youth and vitality.

Her clerical classes were also filled with all sorts of young women. Some of them struck her as gay and jolly, but it wasn't exactly a pursuit of knowledge, or even a pursuit of a good time, that had any of them enrolled. Most of the women in the course were in their early and mid-twenties, though there was a notable older contingency. To the casual observer, the younger girls could be largely divided into two broad tribes. Those who viewed secretarial skills as their ticket to a city where they could more effectively hunt for a husband, and those who viewed it as the best means of avoiding the whole husband debacle altogether.

Faith was largely too preoccupied with the rest of her life to really get involved in the social nuances of her course, but under different circumstances would have gotten on well with many of the girls in the second camp. As it was, she'd made the mistake of referencing her fiancée off-hand in front of a couple of the girls on the second day of class. While a few of them might have been legitimately jealous, most of the women, in both camps, had interpreted this reference as a kind of intentional put down. Faith's wage-earning days were numbered in a rather definitive way.

The classes themselves were uninspiring but straight forwards, but the major upside was she found that if she could will herself to pay attention in the lectures, she had nearly no extra work to do. This left plenty of time for long romps exploring Kingsport, and time enough to try to worry Jerry and Carl with cups of horribly made tea, and insist that Una desist with her own infinitely better cups of tea and return to Una's own studies.

* * *

The bench they were sitting on was flush against the back of the boy's boarding house. While Faith much preferred evening walks around the park, they couldn't always be arranged. She'd learnt not to propose them after the second time Jem had grimaced for a quarter mile before asking, in an overly casual tone, if they might turn back. Now, she'd show up to pick up Jem, and on good days he'd suggest a walk through the park, but more usually they'd take up residence on this particular bench.

"What on earth am I ever going to use all this Chemistry for as an actual doctor anyways?" Jem grumbled. One of his professors this semester was extremely keen on testing them on what the professor termed "review content." It made up a small enough percentage of the testing that Jem could afford to completely flunk it without jeopardising passing the class, but it infuriated him, nonetheless.

"So, you're still in this battle of principles?" Faith asked with a laugh. They both flinched slightly as she said the word "battle". But five years of practice meant they both quickly skipped past the unfortunate word choice, and Jem continued to whine:

"The course is so hard even without requiring us to study every other useless thing we've ever been taught."

"Poor baby," Faith said, one part mocking, one part quite heartfelt.

"How is school treating you?" He asked.

"Well, unlike you, I'm very smart and talented, so I'm having no problems," Faith said.

"Lucky me, I'm marrying the smartest girl in Atlantic Canada!"

"Just the smartest in Atlantic Canada? Not the whole of Canada?" Faith teased, with a dimpled smile.

"Oh, well, you never know. I've heard the girls out in the Prairies are all positively geniuses."

She rolled her eyes and leaned over to kiss him, slowly and properly.

"Faith," He said warningly, placing his hand over hers, which had started on his knee but had been slowly creeping up his thigh throughout their conversation.

She groaned dramatically, but flipped her hand around to hold his, and after leaning in for another quick kiss, let go of his hand with a squeeze, and said, defeatedly, "I know."

She clasped her hands in her lap so they couldn't sneak away again and lent back against the bench with a sigh.

"We're too old for boarding houses. And I miss you!" she exclaimed in frustration.

"Infernal boarding houses," he grumbled in agreement.

* * *

"Nan will have an easier time of it than you will, Faith," Anne Blythe had said to her, on one of the Redmond contingents last nights in the Glen at the beginning of the fall.

Faith had found herself on the Ingleside veranda with Nan, Mrs Marshall Elliot, and Mrs Blythe. They had escaped from the Elliot house an hour previous, after a viewing of Mary Vance's trousseau.

"How exactly?" Nan had exclaimed, indignant, "At least Faith and Jem are in the same town!"

"Well that's exactly the problem," Anne had said, with a slightly wicked smile, "It's not exactly as if you can get yourself in any real trouble with impropriety in a letter, Nan. But it's quite a different story if you live three boarding houses from each other on a long engagement."

"Anne!" Mrs Marshal Elliot had exclaimed, shocked.

"Oh, don't worry Cornelia, I wouldn't let Susan hear me talk this way," Anne had replied, laugh in her voice. Susan was still up at the green house halfway to the Point, exclaiming and inspecting handkerchiefs.

Nan looked as if she couldn't decide if this was hilarious or merely mortifying. As Anne Blythe wasn't her mother, Faith had no trouble determining that this was purely very funny.

* * *

* _AoGG, Chapter 2_


	6. Tedious Little Tragedies

Una Meredith was very lucky.

Or no, Una Meredith was not just lucky, she was blessed. This was something she did well to remind herself of when she was having a hard time of it. And she was having a hard time of it, she thought, halfway to frustrated.

But that wasn't fair either, she reasoned. This course was difficult, and the mark she'd gotten on the last test was outright dismal, but it wasn't the worse grade in the class. Besides, it was only a single course – everyone she knew had gone through much more hardship than a no-good college-level science class in recent years. On the other hand, the grade she'd just gotten was also not a passing grade. It was, in fact, not even close to a passing grade.

She could talk herself down – this really wasn't that important. But then she'd only spiral again – this shouldn't be this hard.

She checked the clock. Past midnight – and she wasn't sure she could learn anything more of this horrible course work. She'd tried and tried to get through the dense mess that was the assigned textbook. She couldn't make heads or tails of it, and, far worse, she couldn't bring herself to focus despite the fact that she had no idea what was going on.

She was tired and fed up, and suspected that she should likely just try and get a good sleep so she could be up early enough to have another go of it in the morning.

She had been attempting to study in her nightgown, so she simply closed her books before slipping into bed. There, she lay back and tried to will sleep to come. As she tried to quiet herself, distracted worrying about her grades gave way to more general concerns.

She'd hoped the hard part was committing to keeping faith when she hadn't felt like it at all. She'd found something to do with herself once the war was over, even though sometimes all she'd wanted to do was shut herself on the top floor of the manse. But she'd made the trip to Kingsport, even after how much she'd disliked her single year at Queen's.

And still, she was lying in bed oscillating between concerned about her last exam grade and concerned about actually important things: Carl's left eye, Jem's leg, and the grimace Jerry couldn't hide as he walked downstairs. The white threads in Anne Blythe's red locks, the way a long-distance call made both households hold their breath even still, the careless vanity Rilla had left behind with her girlhood, and then of course, everlasting, the entirety that was Walter.

What were her tedious little tragedies compared to all they had weathered before this?

* * *

In the morning, Una woke with a determination that could only be conjured in the early hours of a new day. She and Faith both had early morning lectures, and so Faith would be by in around an hour so they could walk the few shorts block to campus together.

They did this every weekday morning, and Una enjoyed the ritual of it. She and Faith had shared a room for most of their lives, and it was nice to return to a routine in which Faith was the first person she talked to each day. The rest of Una's waking hours were inevitably taken up with studying and fretting over the boys and desperately trying to envisage a future that she could be comfortable in. These fifteen minutes felt like a calm interlude – like what she imagined Jerry and Faith got out of their not-so-clandestine cigarette breaks.

"Are you feeling the November Pinch yet?" Faith asked, on this morning.

"The November Pinch?"

"Oh, you know, have you reached the week in November where you feel it's all hopeless and you might as well pack up your bags and head back to the island?" Faith said, off-hand, and with a laugh.

"Oh!" Una could not tell if the flash of recognition was comforting or not. Was it useful to know she wasn't the only one? Or did the banality of the situation just add to the frustration of it?

"I'll take that as a no! You'll recognise it when you face it," Faith replied, mistaking Una's surprise for confusion, "Or maybe you won't – you've always been far more practical than me."

Una considered correcting her, but she didn't want to mar the easiest part of her day with what she knew would consume the rest of her waking hours today. There was no use ruining her good, productive mood with self-indulgent grumbling, she decided. Besides, if everyone else had felt like this and dealt with it, then there was no reason she shouldn't also be able to manage it.

* * *

"Diana!" Rilla cried, walking into the Ingleside sitting room from the veranda door.

"Oh, not you as well!" Di said, nearing petulant.

"Your hair!" Rilla continued, looking shocked as shocked could be.

"Yes, I know, I cut it all off."

Di had been back in the Glen for three hours now, and she wasn't sure how many times she could have the same conversation. Anne had exclaimed when she had seen Di, and then seemed quite conflicted about the whole thing. Gilbert had had the good sense to not consider having an opinion on the matter, a policy he had adopted towards fashion trends in general early on in his marriage, and instead had managed to comment on the haircut without implying anything other than acknowledgement. Susan had not hid her horror, and Cousin Sophia had remarked that it was because of things like these that the whole Glen thought the Blythe girls put on too many airs. And now Rilla.

"It's wonderful!" Rilla sighed, reaching back to pat her own long locks, "Did you do it yourself?"

"Lucie, one of the girls I teach with, did it."

"Is this the Lucie Nan should be jealous of?" Rilla asked.

"Nan? Why? Did something happen with Jer- her friends?"

"What? Nevermind. I think the hair is brilliant," Rilla supplied, with a dimpled smile, "You look like the girl on the cover of Maclean's this month!" *

Di was back at Ingleside for the weekend and had Rilla had been looking forwards to her trip. Rilla had found herself lonely when the school term had started again, without Jims to look after, or a Junior Red Cross to manage. The frantic edge that life had taken on for most of her adolescence had ebbed throughout 1919 and as the year drew to a close, she found herself living once again in a quiet provincial village, the blood red tide that Miss Oliver had dreamt receding to reveal the Glen almost untouched.

Rilla had been only eleven when the twins had started at Queens, and she and Shirley had become nearly-only siblings. The gap between eleven and fifteen had been completely insurmountable then – and the twins and their nearly-long dresses and passing giggles about girls and boys in Charlottetown seemed very grown-up and otherworldly to Rilla.

"Thanks, Ril," Di said, and putting the closed magazine that had been sitting on her lap on the side table, bounced up to take Rilla's arm and added, "Now, will you regale me with ridiculous tales about the dear Glen?"

And so, the two girls went arm in arm up the stairs to sit on the bed in Nan and Di's room and discuss what exactly Mrs Maylock had accused the Carter Flaggs of now. When Anne Blythe walked by their open bedroom door a quarter hour later, she could only hear the sounds of two of her girls in fits of giggles. The good Mrs. Dr reflected that it continued to be true that, wherever Rilla Blythe was, there was laughter. **

* * *

On Faith's fourth evening off from the VAD, she was sitting on a chair in the London hotel room that Jem had talked his way into renting for them. She had finished brushing her hair, and was now in the process of dividing it up to begin two braids.

"I don't know how you do that," Jem said, lazily, from where he was reclined on their (their!) bed.

"Do what?" Faith asked, turning her head slightly to look at him from her work-station. While she had put on a slip when she'd reluctantly pulled herself out of bed, there was still not a stitch on him. She found her eyes passing, still curious, over the tanned and not-tanned parts of him.

"Braid!" he replied, simply.

"What do you mean you can't braid?" she laughed, "You grew up on boats in the Glen! And you're also an adult!"

"Don't be silly, of course I don't know how braids work!" Jem replied, propping himself up on his elbows now. Without the desperate and devastating intensity she'd been overcome by in their first forty-eight hours together, there was fondness she felt, looking over at all of his Jem-ness. The limbs that had been lanky but had strengthened – through age and the Army – into their current proportions. The face she'd known for years, his mother's nose, his father's mouth. Red ruddy curls; the beginnings of laugh lines and forehead grooves. The whole body of someone she'd loved for years.

"How can you possibly not know how braids work?" the part of her that wasn't otherwise distracted asked.

"Well, Susan always insisted on a haircut before it became necessary," he replied, with a teasing smile.

"I suppose so," she said, dubiously, as her fingers deftly and absentmindedly flicked through her first braid. Their first few nights together, Faith hadn't bothered to get out of bed to sort her hair, and had paid dearly for it in the morning.

"Would you show me?" he asked.

And so, Faith Meredith found herself trying to teach her otherwise-competent fiancé how to do something she'd learnt to do before she could properly read.

"Faith, I think this is witchcraft," Jem complained after his third failed attempt.

"I can't believe I'm marrying someone this useless," she groused in response, with the faintest grin on her lips.

"It's still nice to hear you say that," Jem broke away, laughing at himself a little.

"When I say you're useless, sweetheart?" she asked, coy, stroking his ruddy head in a way she hoped seemed sympathetic enough to overcome her slight laughter.

Jem ran his fingers through his failed attempt at her second braid, head resting on her breast, and leaving a full half of her hair entirely unattended.

"When you talk as if we still have a future," he said, truthful in a way he almost instantly wanted to take back.

Their hotel room was terrible in many ways – the sheets would have deeply upset both Rosemary and Susan, and even Aunt Martha could have found problems with parts of their washroom. But four walls and no imminent requirements from anyone else was so far past what Faith could have hoped for.

"It might not be over by Christmas, but we've got to hope it's over soon," she replied, eventually.

"Of course, we must, all-o-my-Faith."

6.5

November had always been the worst month in Kingsport. The weather was always indecisive, with the grey short days interspersed with snowfall that turned too fast to sludge, and the coursework that in September felt so far away was always monstrous. Normally agreeable people became completely unapproachable. Even dear, sweet friends were quick to get on each other's nerves. *** Besides, Jerry was taking too many courses, and Nan had reason to suspect the adjustment back to student wasn't as easy as he'd hoped. Nan knew all of this. And yet.

And yet Jerry's latest letter had still stung. It had been short, and apologetic, and missing the prosy romantic musings that she treasured from her side of the Northumberland Strait. She supposed she should have been prepared for him to call off their trip to Charlottetown. He was taking too many courses, enough that he would have had a difficult time without the four years in Normandy. Jerry believed that hard, conscientious work would always show for itself. He believed that meaning could be derived in everything, given patience and good intention. Nan didn't love him because any of these things, but she did love all these things about him.

And his letter, short as it was, still contained little sweet lines, she thought, trying to steel herself. Besides, she reasoned, there were many aspects of their trip that were proving difficult. Nan had heard from Faith about Faith and Jem's little stunt in London, and she had been privately holding out ridiculous hope that they could organize something similar. She'd had to admit to herself that that didn't seem possible last week, and then chastised herself for feeling disappointed.

Last weekend had marked the end of fall for her, the first time she absolutely couldn't cycle down to Avonlea. So, she found herself, unexpectedly and without fault, unoccupied in Bright River this weekend. She had marking to do, and there were parts of the winter concert that were still not working well in rehearsals – that could do with some good thought.

Besides, she had her own fancy work project that she could make some serious inroads on. They were past the days of the elaborate homemade trousseaus that she had day-dreamed about as a child, and she would order many of the things that she and Jerry would need. There was no question of her beating their Auntie Di's doily record. Besides, each of the Blythe girls had a number of quilts and rugs up in the Ingleside attic that had been kept for them from when they were children as a gift from the late Aunt Marilla and Mrs Rachel Lynde.

But Nan had her mother's sentimental streak, and a fondness for both the unreasonable and the intricate. Last summer, while poking around the aforementioned-attic, she had found a pattern for one of Mrs Lynde's cotton warp quilts – an apple leaf one. The writing was cramped and faded enough that Nan felt quite the investigator as she tried to decipher the instructions that had been left by the formidable woman that she remembered only slightly from her earliest childhood. She had determined that this would be an ideal project to save her from boredom while cooped up in Bright River this winter.

She had meant to start it as soon as her new job had begun, but there had been excitement enough until this very weekend. And so, Nan prepared herself to begin the project, and tried to summon enough good will to begin without dooming the project. She had done enough needlework over the years to know that casting on in a less-than-stellar mood could create quite the curse, and cause the whole piece to misbehave.

She tried, therefore, to remain in high spirits as she cast on the first three hundred and ten stitches that would begin the first of thirty-six squares required for the blanket. After losing count for the second time somewhere around the two hundred and fiftieth stitch, she decided her first tea break was in order. The quilt might take a while.

6.3

"We have a surprise for you," Diana Blythe said, marching into the living room that her mother and father were both sitting in.

Evidentially, nobody had felt like being born or dying on this particular day in the Glen, and as a result Dr Blythe appeared to be making decent headway through the "The Economic Consequences of the Peace." He was flipping pages and muttering in either agreement or irritation quite frequently, to the bemusement of his wife, and irritation of Susan, who felt it quite too soon to intellectualize these matters. ****

"Well your hair isn't green, so that's good" Dr Blythe replied, dryly.

"Pardon me?" Di asked, perplexed. Anne Blythe regretted having ever told her husband that story.

At this point, Rilla Blythe walked into the living room as well.

"So it was about hair!" Dr Blythe said, "And you've corrupted Rilla so quickly!"

Poor Di Blythe flushed, and stammered out that it had been Rilla's idea. She knew her father wasn't angry about the whole affair, but she worried, quite without cause, that he was nonetheless disappointed in her. In actual fact, Dr Blythe held no strong feelings over his girls' hair, but simply took some joy in jokingly tormenting those in his household. All of Ingleside knew this in principal, and most of them had inherited his teasing ways to some degree or another, but very occasionally the children would wonder if a particular joke had held any real feeling behind it. Had Dr Blythe any idea that these concerns ever plagued them, he would have been quite justly horrified. Alas, the Blythe children had inherited pride from both sides of the family and past the age of around twelve, none of them would ever stoop to expressing this to their otherwise doting father.

As it was, Rilla Blythe now sported a quite becoming, and ever-so modern, haircut. The haircut in question had been administered by Di in the small barn out back, in order to avoid the sweeping nightmare that would have befallen them had they attempted this in any of the Ingleside washrooms. Her hair was cropped to just below her chin, exposing her neck in a way that was sure to give Cousin Sophia fits, and framing her face quite masterfully. Di had done a good job of it, despite the terrible ten minutes where Di had cursed quietly after a particularly decisive snip and sent Rilla into a full panic that had only been resolved after some tense words on both sides.

Before the haircut, Di had said her head would feel a lot lighter, and Rilla had wondered what she meant. But now, she understood, and Rilla felt as if her head and her soul both had wings. *****

* * *

"If you'd like some light reading," Faith said, flinging the November edition of Maclean's magazine down in front of Jem.

Una had a subscription, which she read and then dutifully passed to Faith, who would in turn pass it to the boys.

"Funny that you term this "light"" Jem said, picking up the magazine and flipping through.

"Well it's not in Latin, and some of it's fiction, so that ought to seem light enough to you!"

"And I'm sure the VAD article is all fun and games?"

"Well, nooo, but you know better than to read the War stuff," Faith said slowly. ******

"I was in the War, Faith, I don't know what you think your protecting me from," Jem replied, his tone not quite managing teasing.

"In which case, I'm serious this time, don't read this one!" Faith said, almost sounding joking.

Jem continued to assess the table of contents. The boys had not told Faith and Una that Mrs Brown also had a subscription, which they could just as easily read. There was something Jem liked in the knowledge that one of the Merediths had underlined a section or dog-eared a certain page. He knew nothing much would have changed if he'd read the communal copy at the boarding house instead, but he found he liked the system they had. Sentimentalism was getting the better of him, and he didn't mind at all.

* * *

Three days after her Faith had introduced Una to the concept of the November Pinch, Faith and Una were on a walk through the park, and Una's schoolwork was no closer to being under control. She was somewhat distractedly thinking about how on earth she was going to remedy this, while trying to follow Faith as she marched down the path to the water. Had Una been less preoccupied with her own problems, she might have realized that Faith was also in a mood on this particular day.

Eventually, Faith threw herself down on a bench overlooking the North West Arm.

"Are you alright, Faith?" Una ventured.

"Doesn't this seem ridiculous to you?" Faith replied, gesturing vaguely at the waterfront.

"Which part?" Una said, uncertain of where this was going.

"The whole thing," Faith said with a sigh, "I've been boarding for nine years, Una, it's completely ridiculous."

"Well, plenty of young women board for a long time while they work," Una replied carefully. She was barely keeping herself together as it stood, and she wasn't sure what she would do if Faith began to outright panic. Una felt them to be at a very precarious crossroad that could too easily result in the unprecedented meltdown of the Meredith girls.

"Well I didn't expect to, and I'm done with it."

"Okay," Una said softly, going to sit down next to Faith. Perhaps this could be a quiet meltdown, and Una could provide some reassuring, non-verbal, comfort. She was fairly certain she couldn't navigate this conversation successfully in her current state.

"The only conversation I've had with anyone on my course this week has been about the occult," Faith continued.

This startled Una considerably.

"Excuse me?" Una asked, perplexed, her curiosity overtaking her earlier pledge to not encourage this conversation in the slightest, for all their sakes.

"Some of the girls have a group where they try to speak to the dead, apparently," Faith said, with a twisted expression of disgust on her face, "They said that Ethel is their best medium, and asked if I was interested." *******

"My goodness," Una replied. She had heard, before the war, about the nicer houses in Charlottetown where women tried to raise spirits in their parlours for fun. The practice had struck her then as not just godless, but also somewhat gauche. The late war resurgence of these parlor games unsettled her immensely.

During the war, Una had heard of the strange hauntings of old battlegrounds, and she knew that many of their dominion's boys had unexplained stories of strange interactions. Her brothers, who didn't talk of the war to her at all anymore, had a few incidences that they'd alluded to that she could not square with her understanding of the world. And even she held onto the belief that Dog Monday knew, and surely that could not be much more easily explained than any of the rest of this. Regardless though, Una reserved her right to be quite shocked by talk of the occult.

"It's preposterous," Faith said, with finality, "And I'm very bored of having to deal with all of this."

Una was still not clear what "all of this" encompassed, but she decided to stick with the assumption that the clerical courses were the problem right now.

"You've only got a month left, it'll be over so soon!"

"Thank goodness. I can't imagine doing two years like you are!" Faith said, "You're far more patient than I think I'll ever be!"

Una couldn't imagine two years either.

* * *

"I brought this back, thank you for lending it to us," Shirley said to Una, handing over the magazine, once they'd both taken a seat in the parlor of her boarding house. Una's landlady had won the tussle over which of them should prepare tea, and so Una was left only to take Shirley's coat and hat and sit down with him.

They sat in a polite quiet for a while, and Una tried to will her mind to stop whiring over the mess of textbook jumble sitting on her desk upstairs.

"Have you been reading the Spanish Doubloons?" She asked, after a minute. ********

"I've, uh, been trying."

Shirley knew he should be trying harder. Not with Spanish Doubloons, which honestly, he didn't care for as a story, but with everyone else. And maybe especially with Una.

He and Rilla had developed a robust correspondence that largely revolved around him sending Rilla fairly bland and occasionally funny letters, and Rilla sending him letters with lots of instruction. It might have occurred to him to be offended that Rilla thought he needed as much guidance, but unfortunately, he was normally too distracted taking up the advice to worry himself with the implications of needing it.

The latest letter had instructed him in no uncertain terms to march down to Una's boarding house and check in on her. He was peripherally aware that academic commitments were proving some concern to Jerry and Carl, both of whom could be found muttering over their desks late into every night, and still back at work early in the morning. Jem appeared to be fairing somewhat better, but he was still so far removed from the boisterous brother he had been before the war that Shirley sometimes wondered if he'd imagined all their earlier personalities. There was a weary apprehension to all three men that he was almost certain hadn't existed before the war.

Rilla's letter had said that Una was never going to let on to any of them that she was having a hard time, and so Shirley was to go find some way of ameliorating the situation without waiting for the confession. This had shocked Shirley considerably, as Una was very much what Susan termed "a brick."

He couldn't remember a time Una had ever asked for help from any of them. Later he realised that this likely proved Rilla's point. As he sat in Una's parlor and tried to hold a conversation about serialized stories he wasn't reading, he wondered how he could offer anything that Una would accept without a reflexive brush off.

He'd wondered, a few times, since he'd been back if he was supposed to propose marriage to Una Meredith. He'd never quite been able to pin down whether it would be a kindness or just a defeat, on either of their parts.

Rilla had given him some idea that Una had had her hopes pinned on some boy or another from the Glen, but he'd never really managed to figure out if it had been Walter or Jack Davies, both of whom had always been kind to her. In any case, neither of those boys had returned, and there was a dimness in Una that had well predated her current coursework issues. Their friendship had always been too understated to be rightly described as chumminess, but they'd gotten along well their whole lives.

"And how's the course work going?" He eventually asked, coming as close to blurting as a man as usual composed as Shirley Blythe was could.

Una was not expecting the change in topic, and surveyed him for a moment before replying, almost reflexive, "Well, thank you!"

Earlier in the day, she had wished fervently that someone would just ask her that very question so she could seek counsel without having to actually seek it out. And now that someone had, she had brushed it away at once. She felt a wave of frustration rush over her.

"Oh, well, fantastic!" Shirley replied.

Did he seem surprised? Una wondered. If he did, was that because he suspected something? Would he ask again? And if he did, would she tell him anything?

Faith was right, this was getting to be ridiculous.

* * *

_* Maclean's magazine had girls with short hair on the cover for most of 1919. Also, the whole Maclean's archive from 1905 to 2008 is currently free and online, and makes for some very fun reading. (Although I guess there is a mild canon hiccup to be had - LMM is mentioned A LOT in it in the early 20th century!)_

_** Paraphrased from RoI, Chapter 1_

_*** Fun fact the phrase "Get on my nerves" first appeared in print in the mid 1900's, about a decade before this story is set._

_**** The Economic Consequences of the Peace was published in late 1919, by John Maynard Keynes who was very much not a fan of the Treaty of Versailles. He was a leading American economist who essentially argues in this book that the treaty would have long term negative economic consqeuences for everyone, and was therefore a bad idea. It was widely read in the US, the UK and Canada, and helped form a lot of the interwar sentiment about the peace treaty. It's also credited as one of the (many, complicated) reasons that appeasement of Hitler's Germany was popular for so long in these countries. It's available on Gutenberg. _

_***** Paraphrased from RoI, Chapter 3_

_****** The November issue has a lot of wacky stuff in it, but specifically the VAD section is pretty overwhelming. The section about careers for your daughter is also super interesting. Originally when I was writing this chapter, I imagined these articles would be discussed more explicitly by characters but alas in the end that was not what happened here. Imagine it's happening off the page though!_

_******* Spiritualism and the First World War is another good deep dive if you're looking for a wikipedia hole to fall down! _

_******** Spanish Doubloons is a serialized story in Maclean's that ran in 1919. It is fairly confusing if you don't start from the top. _

* * *

_A/N: Hi! I hope you are all well! I am back with a chapter! Believe it or not, a lot of this was written before I'd published the fifth chapter but then it started seriously misbehaving and I had to tear it apart and put it back together. I'm not quite happy with it as it stands, but I'm also sick of looking at it so out it goes! _

_I'm horrifyingly behind on my correspondence with folks here, and my sincerest apologies if I have ignored a message or comment - I love hearing from people, and appreciate and cherish everything people have had to say, and I hope to get back to everyone I've left hanging later this week - unfortunately real life has been getting in the way a little of late! _


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